Perspectives & News

You are here

In the News

Modeling ecological processes at global scales is complicated by the fact that available underlying spatial and temporal data often incorporate enormous uncertainty. For example, the WorldClim data set (which has been cited over 2000 times) offers 1-kilometer resolution globally whether the pixel...

Climate scientists predict that climate change will lead to increased variability in precipitation over much of South America. Research by Carlton et al (2013) on residents of northwestern rural Ecuador who rely on streams and rivers for their drinking water shows how those changes might impact...

A changing climate effects the availability of water, agriculture, and virtually everyone on the planet. To predict changes in vegetation cover and adapt water usage appropriately it’s necessary to constrain changes in evaporative flux. Measuring evaporation is more challenging than other...

The internet’s vast quantities of information and its popularity among people all over the globe represent a tempting and enormous data pool for researchers. Political strategists, economists, and epidemiologists mine internet usage data to learn about human behaviors and cultural trends, producing...

In a simple but important analysis, Mora and colleagues analyzed climate projections to identify when future warming will exceed the climate envelope of the past 150 years. They used multiple models (39) and seven climate variables (such as near-surface temperature and precipitation), to quantify...

A new record at 44.7% total conversion efficiency by a consortium of German and French researchers at Fraunhofer ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti, and the Helmholtz Center Berlin has demonstrated the viability of an untraditional design for high-efficiency solar cells. The breakthrough was achieved using “...

Understanding the ecological mechanisms governing the biogeogoraphy of organisms is essential to predict how climate change will alter ecosystems and their functioning. Factors affecting the patterns of aboveground plant and animal communities across landscapes have received extensive attention in...